Flaming entities like candles or torches are limited in their ability to produce a larger flame without creating a plume or a periodic wisp of soot. Similarly, larger flames tend to be high excessively high for safe indoor use, resulting in fire hazard concerns. Smaller flames produced limited light and cannot generate enough heat to sufficiently melt a solid fuel that enough or completely enough. This is especially true in wax burning products that are intended to deliver a volatile, active ingredient, like fragrance, insect repellent, aroma therapy compound, or other additives that a user desires to fill an area to perform a meaningful job like scenting a room or repelling insects.
Because a flame's ability to cast light and generate heat flux into a system relies on the flame's surface area, currently available wax burning alternatives are inadequate to offer brighter lighting without the plume of ash or soot. Traditional candles are greatly limited in their ability to shed light because of the vertical pillar nature of their flame geometry. This flame geometry quickly exceeds the professional standards for safe indoor candle use (3 inches). Even planar wicks, which can increase the length of a flame), cannot create large flames without sooting excessively. Oil lanterns (that run on liquid fuels like kerosene, mineral oil, olive oil, or other liquid fuel) can create a larger flame with a planar wick but these products will not manage heat transfer required to both melt and deliver a melted wax to the flame. Oil lanterns simply cannot tolerate solid fuels.
The limited flame surface area of traditional wax candles also creates inability to deliver enough heat to a candle or wax burning system to offset the natural cooling that tends to keep a wax solid or reforms the melted wax into a solid as the radial distance from the candle flame increase. Because of this, traditional candles fail to completely consume all of the solid wax fuel—unless the total distance from the flame is kept very small (as in a tea light). However, because the melt pool surface area remains very small, this kind of system fails to volatilize any active ingredient and deliver it to the air efficiently or completely.
Some prior art wax burning products can completely consume the sand wax fuel and create and maintain a sufficiently larger melt pool through the use of the product. However, in order to accomplish this, the products use heat conductive fins that must be placed within the flame itself to help transfer the heat of the small flame to an area that can melt and maintain the liquid wax. In doing do, the light of an already small flame is further diminished, and the aesthetics of the flame are compromised. And even so, the time to completely melt the wax fuel still approaches one hour.
Outdoor candles, even candles with larger wicks and larger flames whose flames are exposed to the natural elements, tend to be susceptible to extinguishing—even in the slightest breeze. They are also often very susceptible to the ambient temperatures. In cool air, candles take longer to develop a pool of melted wax. As the ambient temperature cools, especially below 70 degrees F., these types of traditional wax burning products produce a wax pool of much smaller diameter because of the cooling affect of the ambient air on the wax itself. These products are unable to be used and to operate as designed or intended because they are greatly dependent on ambient temperature conditions.
Presently there is no product that offers a larger flame without sooting. No product produces a flame that is resistant to extinguishing in the wind. No wax burning product works reliably in a wide range of ambient temperature conditions. No available, system can melt a solid wax fuel completely and quickly without the need to compromise the flame, as with a metal fin in the flame or an apparatus that hangs above a flame.